09.23.04
Posted in Mom at 8:18 am by Beau
My mother visited me last night; a feat in and of itself since she’s been dead now for a year and a half. I’ve surprised even myself since she died because I’m about the only one I know of who she hasn’t come calling on in one way or another. I would have though of anyone, I’d be the one who would most fully feel and see my mother in the everyday waking world since I think I’m so open and accepting of that kind of non-logic but in reality, when Amber left the building, she left the building. Even when I went looking for her, she wasn’t there. I was beginning to resign myself to a life without her, even in my dreams, feeling somehow my wiring wouldn’t let me pick her up, even though in my mind, I was ready and willing for however she wanted to appear. Leave it to her to pull a trick like last night when I didn’t even realize I was dreaming or having the visit.
Though the dream is twisty and convoluted in the way dreams usually are with people melting into others and strange, cryptographic symbolism that I can’t figure out (the bridesmaids in her wedding were all told the theme was “greed” and came with soot on their faces and bobbed hair cuts with the ends dyed blue), the important part to realize was that I didn’t know I was dreaming which is rare for me. I can usually tell when I’m wrapped up in a dream, though I still can’t do much about it and suffer plenty with running in place scenarios and those kinds of things. But last night I was enjoying her wedding, her fourth one, and to a previous long-time boyfriend who in her living years she never married and who, coincidentally, died several months after her from the same lung cancer she did. Yes I found it strange she was dressed in periwinkle since she’s always been more of a violet-lover but the wedding was nice and everyone was happy and nothing seemed out of place. I spoke to her afterwards as she was sitting with her new husband, asking where they were going for their honeymoon. She told me Marti Gras and that’s when something changed for me. I told her that Marti Gras was in late February or early March and it’s only September. Was she sure they were going to Marti Gras? She couldn’t be going to Marti Gras because that doesn’t make sense and then the dream started to melt and she just looked at me and smiled and I seemingly woke up…on a train with my Dad. I was still trying to shake off the confusion about the honeymoon but I was even more confused as to how I’d gotten on a train and where we were going and how I couldn’t remember anything in the past. It was disconcerting in a way that had me starting to panic because my Dad just couldn’t answer me. I kept asking him how I got there and he kept asking me how I couldn’t know, so I got up and started to walk the train aisles and that’s when I found my Mom, standing around one of the corners, looking like she was waiting for me, and that’s when I knew she was gone and I was being visited. She looked the same as she always did to me, petite, tanned, thick, wavy brown hair and she was smiling.
“But you’re gone,” I said.
“Oh honey,” she snickered like the joke was on me. “It’s ok, you’ll get over it.”
And then she put on a big, wide brimmed straw hat with a purple bow tied around it and walked off down the train. Strangely, she’s not really a hat person.
I woke up just as the alarm was going off this morning, feeling like I’d gotten the best kind of visit because it wasn’t sorrowful and it wasn’t full of despair or relief or even the feeling that it was other-worldly. It felt like her playing a fun little trick: let’s show Beau something he’d like only to be ruined by my anxious curiosity to make sure everything was right and sensible, blowing the illusion away to reveal my Mom, as she had always been: humor and insight and exasperation with my never-ceasing anxiety fully intact. She always thought it was funny and a little sad at how worked up and over-wrought I’d become over the littlest, stupidest things. I was much too high-strung for her but of course, she smoked a lot of pot so a lot of people seemed that way to her, I think. Regardless, the visit was a pleasure for me. One of those rare treasures to put away and look at every now and again if for no other reason, then to remind me I’m not really as cut off from her as I think.
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09.21.04
Posted in Home Life at 1:50 pm by Beau
How is it possible that an eye-brow waxing can hurt more than a 5cm trichofolliculoma being cut out of your cheek? I really want to know.
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09.18.04
Posted in Home Life at 4:07 pm by Beau
Not to be outdone by all those special people down south who’ve been through two, maybe three hurricanes, I now have an Ivan-related adventure brewing up here in Barryville. Not since the Great Pumpkin Flood of 1915 has this area been so deluged with overflowing rivers and streams from the rainfall. From all the rain getting dumped on us over the past few days, the Delaware River has swollen to record levels, currently up 20 feet and expecting to crest another 10 feet higher by tomorrow morning. It was so sudden and unexpected that the huge cranes being used to build our new bridge between Barryville and Shahola, PA were completely submerged by this morning before the contractors could get out to move them back off the shore. They’ve declared our county and those surrounding us disaster areas and are starting forced evacuations of the residents living lower and closer to the river. Fortuitously, Jeff and I purchased a home well up on a hillside, far enough away from the temperamental river and now only just need to go help neighbors rather than ourselves.
For Jeff and my part, we spent the morning helping a friend’s 89-year old mother move all her earthly possessions from her ground-level floor to the upper levels of her home as she sits on the river and is expecting the worse. She was showing us the water and silt marks on her furniture from the last time the river had flooded her place, back in 1955.
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09.17.04
Posted in Home Life at 10:58 pm by Beau
Honestly, I’m just lazy enough to have a week off between classes and not once pick up the blog. I’d like to say it was all the hurricane business but obviously, we only got (and are currently getting) sloppy seconds so who cares, really?
For anyone having to suffer through my bitching and moaning about the horror of Marketing 551, thanks. My in depth analysis of a big pharma company ended up being close to 30 pages of what can only be assessed as pure drivel and with no baring on the actual state of marketing at that company, but somehow I got an A, regardless. When I say my B.S. in Nursing stands for Bull Shit, that just ain’t no lie. Yet the 4.0 continues so who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth. I’m starting into my statistics class this week and for being math-retarded, I’m looking forward to it. I do encounter stats on a day to day basis in clinical research so I’m treating it like puke on my shoes back in my patient care days: it just happens and you go along with it.
I found out the really large, gross zit on my cheek that had the tuft of white hair springing from it for the past six months is actually a rare, aberrant dermatological phenomenon. As my dead mother had a fist-sized amount of her muscles and tissues on her back removed 30 years ago for malignant melanoma, I wasn’t too hesitant to go get it checked out. Unfortunately for Jeff, who is the picker-popper of all aberrant dermatological phenomenon in Bashert, this thing, which could express copious amounts of pustulant exudate daily when prompted, needed to come off so I had it dug out last week and took some stitches to the mug. Just a little trichofolliculoma, but still, who wants to look like you have big zit on your face when it’s really nothing of the sort. Apparently as I’m now of an adult age, my skin is rebelling and I’m getting old-man skin tags and stuff all over the place so I’m having periodical derm-excision on my face over the next six weeks for all my little bumps and discolorations. Not as much fun as a dermibrasion, fruit-acid peel, or botox, but I gotta do the foundation work before I go for the pretty stuff.
Walking around with a stitched face is always fun. Mostly when asked, I told people Jeff was beating the shit out of me and honestly, some people didn’t act too surprised. I don’t know if that says more about Jeff’s capacity for spousal correction or my capacity to drive someone to it.
Lunch-time conversation today:
All the co-workers gathers around the conference room, wolfing down BurgerKing, telling me Jeff and I need to have a kid because we’d make great dads.
Them: “But whose sperm would it be? Yours or Jeff’s? It should be yours. It should definitely be yours.”
Me: “I don’t know…all our sperm tastes the same to me anyway.”
Them: “…”
Then the conversation migrated to me explaining where the girls could find their boyfriend’s prostates. I’m nothing if not a teacher of life.
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